Loading a ship's cargo piece by piece · Ceded (since 1956)

The Ideal X leaves Port Newark for Houston on 26 April with fifty-eight containers loaded in under eight hours, work that took gangs of longshoremen days in break bulk.

Break bulk meant sacks, crates, drums and bales carried, stacked and stowed by hand in a hold, one of the most dangerous trades in any port. The box removed the handling and the automated terminal removed the driving, Rotterdam having opened the first of them at the Delta site in 1993 with unmanned vehicles between quay and stack and automated stacking cranes. Lashing and unlashing containers on deck is still done by people climbing among the stacks, and so are inspection, plugging refrigerated boxes, damage survey and every part of the work that meets weather. Port employment fell hard and unevenly, and what is left of the docker's trade now sits largely in a control room.